Over the past year, I’ve started to see a lot of interest in Karl Marx and his ideas as well as critiques of capitalism on social media. I was curious to see if this same interest would be reflected in the Seattle Public Library and wanted to analyze the checkouts of items relating to Karl Marx, capitalism, and socialism. My objective is to explore interest in these topics over time as well as how titles with these keywords are categorized.

For this query, I extracted items with ‘Karl Marx’, ‘marxism’, ‘marxist’, or ‘marxian’ in the title, and ordered them by the frequency of checkouts by assigning the variable count to item’s bibNumber. I also ran a second query with keywords 'capitalism' and 'capitalist'.

SELECT
title, bibNumber, COUNT(bibNumber) AS count, itemtype, deweyClass
FROM
spl_2016.outraw
WHERE
title LIKE '%karl marx%'
OR title LIKE '% marxism%'
OR title LIKE '% marxist%'
OR title LIKE '% marxian%'
GROUP BY bibNumber , itemtype , title, deweyClass
ORDER BY count DESC
LIMIT 2000;


For this third query, I extracted all items Dewey classified as 335: Socialism and Related Systems.

SELECT
title, bibNumber, COUNT(bibNumber) AS count, itemtype
FROM
spl_2016.outraw
WHERE
deweyClass >= 335 and deweyClass < 336
GROUP BY bibNumber , itemtype , title
ORDER BY count DESC
LIMIT 2000;


For the remaining queries, I wanted to see interest in the checkouts extracted from the previous queries over time.

SELECT
YEAR(i.cout) AS year,
COUNT(*) AS count
FROM
(SELECT
bibNumber, cout, itemType, title
FROM
spl_2016.outraw
WHERE
title LIKE '%karl marx%'
OR title LIKE '% marxism %'
OR title LIKE '% marxist %'
OR title LIKE '% marxian %') AS i
GROUP BY YEAR(i.cout)
ORDER BY year ;

For the first query, a total of 91 items were returned. These are the top 20. The most popular item is a DVD of the historical drama film, The Young Karl Marx. There are several biographies such as Karl Marx: A Nineteenth Century Life and Karl Marx: A Life.



Below is a graph of the Dewey Classifications of these items. 42 of the items are non-Dewey (plotted as 0), 35 are in the 300s, which is classified as Social Sciences. 20 of those are 335: Socialism and related systems. 3 titles are classified as 193: Philosophy of Germany and Austria. 4 are in the 200s: Religion, 4 are in the 800s: Literature, and 3 are in the 940s: History of Europe.



For the second query, a total of 505 items with titles containing 'capitalism' or 'capitalist' were returned. The most popular item is a DVD of the documentary film, Capitalism: A Love Story, centering the late-2000s financial crisis and ends with the filmmaker calling for the elimination of capitalism. Many of the other top items are critiques of capitalism including Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism and This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate.



Below is a graph of the Dewey Classifications of these items. 70 of the items are non-Dewey (plotted as 0). 7 items are classified in the 100s: Philosophy and Psychology. 11 are in the 200s: Religion. 373 items are classified in the 300s: Social Sciences. Of those, 171 are classified as 330: Economics. One item is classified as 510: Mathematics, 17 are in the 600s: Technology, 6 are in the 700s: Arts and Recreation, 3 are in the 800s: Literature, and 16 are in the 900s: History and Geography.



For the third query, a total of 477 items Dewey Classified as Socialism and Related Systems were returned. Like the previous two queries, the top item is a DVD. It is titled ‘Emma Goldman’ who was an anarchist political activist and writer. The second most checked-out item is Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto, though if versions with different bibNumbers are added together, they would surpass the Emma Goldman DVD.



For queries 4, 5, and 6 I found the number of items from the first three queries checked out per year. These are the results and their corresponding graphs of popularity of checkouts per year. The y-axes of the graphs show the number of checkouts of its corresponding category divided by total number of checkouts that year.

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